The Kremlin was accused of seeking a scapegoat for the murder of Anna Politkovskaya, the crusading investigative reporter, after Russia's supreme court overturned the acquittal of three men linked to her death.

Mrs Politkovskaya was shot dead outside her Moscow flat in October 2006Photo: GETTY

By Adrian Blomfield in Moscow

7:40PM BST 25 Jun 2009

The court ordered the suspects to face a new trial just five months after a jury cleared them of involvement in the 2006 assassination of Mrs Politkovskaya, a fierce critic of Vladimir Putin's human rights record in Chechnya and elsewhere.

Colleagues and relatives denounced the decision as a politically-inspired ruse designed to create the impression that justice was being served while allowing the real culprits to remain at liberty.

All three of the defendants are accused of playing minor roles in the murder, while the mastermind has never been identified and the suspected gunman has evaded capture.

"It's completely obvious that today's ruling was based on a political decision, not a procedural one," Sergei Sokolov, deputy editor of the Novaya Gazeta newspaper where Mrs Politkovsakaya worked, told Ekho Moskvy radio.

"For the authorities, the most important this was just to make sure someone went to prison."

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The murder of Mrs Politkovskaya, who was shot dead outside her Moscow flat in October, 2006, badly damaged the reputation of Mr Putin, Russia's president-turned-prime minister.

His image suffered further the following month when the ex-KGB defector Alexander Litvinenko, another outspoken Kremlin critic, was murdered in London when the radioactive agent Polonium-210 was slipped into his tea.

The Kremlin, which has denied involvement in both murders, has been accused of unwillingness to solve either case.

But, according to observers, the authorities have been desperate to fend off international scrutiny by securing a symbolic conviction in the Politkovskaya case that would allow the Kremlin to argue that the rule of law in Russia was still being upheld.

Human rights activists say that widespread impunity and a lack of judicial independence suggest the opposite is true, pointing to the unresolved contract killings of 16 reporters since Mr Putin came to power in 2000 as evidence supporting their arguments.

Apparently hoping still to secure a conviction, the supreme court reversed the acquittals of former policeman Sergei Khadzhikurbanov and two Chechen brothers Dzhabrail and Ibragim Makhmudov on a technicality.

Judges ruled that the lower court had breached procedure by failing to prevent defence lawyers from exerting pressure on the jury.

Observers said the Kremlin would seek to ensure that a second trial was conducted in secret without a jury.

While most Russian judges are considered ciphers of the Kremlin, jury trials have frequently proved unpredictable and problematic for the government, which has threatened to abolish them for some serious cases.

According to statistics collected by legal watchdogs, trials in which guilt is decided by judges alone have resulted in a 95 percent conviction rate, as opposed to under 50 per cent in jury trials.

Jurors in the first Politkovskaya trial succeeded in thwarting attempts to hold hearings in secret by publicly denying the judge's claims that they had received death threats.

The decision by the Supreme Court, which last month lost the last vestiges of independence when it was stripped of the right to choose its own president, was strongly condemned by Mrs Politkovskaya's relatives.

"We did not challenge the acquittals," said Anna Stavitskaya, the family's lawyer. "We did not think it needed to be overturned. We do not want to see the case brought to a standstill."

Mrs Politkovskaya's son Ilya said he did not believe there was enough evidence to convict any of the three defendants, who are accused of staking out the journalist's home before the killing, acquiring the murder weapon and driving the getaway car.

The three men said they were prepared to face a second trial and convinced that they would once again be vindicated.

"We've never run in our lives and we're not going to run from this now," Dzhabrail Makhmudov said.